The validator gives operators of OpenStack systems a simple tool at hand to check if their OpenStack installation is ready to run Cloud Foundry. OpenStack comes with a lot of options and flexibility, and not all configurations are equally suitable to run Cloud Foundry. The requirements are documented and there are instructions how to manually check them, but it requires quite some expert knowledge to get everything right.

The validator is supposed to encapsulate the expert knowledge and instructions. It checks all requirements automatically and gives operators a report with the information if requirements are met or what they need to change. Cloud Foundry makes it simple for developers to deploy their applications. We try to capture the same spirit of simplicity for operators of Cloud Foundry on OpenStack.

We are running a test pipeline for the continuous integration of the BOSH Cloud Provider Interface for OpenStack which is used in Cloud Foundry. This runs on SUSE OpenStack Cloud. It works smoothly now, but while getting there it would have been great to have the validator to have a simple check of the setup without having to go through manual deployment and testing and finding issues with the setup late in the process. We captured some of this experience in code, and it is much easier with the validator now.

The architecture of the validator is quite simple. It uses the same interfaces as BOSH and Cloud Foundry to access the underlying cloud infrastructure, so it closely resembles what is happening in production. Most of this goes through the Cloud Provider Interface. Some lower level checks directly use the OpenStack APIs.

Tests are written in RSpec, which gives a nice concise way to describe and run the checks which are run by the validator. The validator is provided as a standalone tool, which can simply be run on the command line and will print out a report with what checks it has run, if they have succeeded, and what needs to be done if something is missing. In the end it will answer the question, if my OpenStack is ready to run Cloud Foundry, and this hopefully will be a big green yes.

There is ongoing work to improve the validator, to add more checks, and make it more complete in checking the requirements of the full stack, from OpenStack, through the Cloud Provider Interface, to Cloud Foundry. This will be a continuous improvement process with new checks being added as they are found to be relevant when setting up OpenStack based Cloud Foundry installations. To make this easier and also allow to add custom checks, there likely will be some kind of plugin interface to add new checks to the validator.

As it is using the abstract Cloud Provider Interface it might also be interesting to use the validator with other cloud infrastructures, and we need to evaluate how it plays with other approaches of validating cloud infrastructure. The project is open, the code is published as open source, and we are welcoming feedback and discussions about its future direction.